Image description: the above image is of a thick hardback dictionary, open to a page in the ‘D’ section. The stenciled letters ‘OMG LOL’ have been punched out of the middle of facing pages, to a depth of a considerable number of pages.

The image is by See-ming Lee æŽæ€æ˜Ž on Flickr, and used under Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike.

This is an open thread for any topic, but if you want some January 1-based topics of conversation, how about:

if you celebrated a gifting holiday recently, do you have any new toys?

did you have a geeky rather than traditional celebration of any kind? (for any value of ‘geeky’ and ‘traditional’, assuming they’re in fact different for you!)

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4 thoughts on “Open thread: hello from the future”

December 31 in Sydney, as no doubt in almost all Western cities, did not strike me as a good night to be well away from home and nine months pregnant, so I had a much geekier New Years than I normally would. (Normally some combination of food, fireworks and music would suit me.) We had a four person game of Cities and Knights of Catan, which I didn’t win, although as I’ve only played it twice I was pleased with my patient and successful construction of the cloth metropolis. And we played Guitar Hero 5 and Mario Kart Wii until it showed that our reaction times were unacceptably sleep and/or beer depressed, depending on guest.

There was a lot of reaction in Australia this year to a Hottest 100 of All Time music poll by an alternative music station, which included only two female vocalists (both appearing on Massive Attack tracks as co-writers of their material) and not many songs with any women instrumentalists either. Playing Guitar Hero, which has only very slightly better representation of women than that, makes me wonder how much that franchise is responsible for my age group’s sense of the history of rock. Confidential to Guitar Hero: women rock too…

I’d enjoy that, but I’d prefer that the core games included far more material by women (as songwriters and performers).

One of the things that came up in the Hottest 100 discussion was that rock history is revisionist, disappearing women as time goes on. There were plenty of women in grunge, for example, who were admired and fanboyed at the time, but they’ve vanished from the greatest hits of your youth parades and the men haven’t. A great deal of the defence of the poll was along the lines of “yeah, but women didn’t really break into music until very recently” (on a poll which mostly turned up post-1970s music!)

Must have been something in the water … on new years eve, I was sat envisioning the future of IT service management (not hardcore geek I admit, but geeky enough I figure…) and I came up with some ideas about how feminism can help extract ITSM from this somewhat obdurate and masculine hole that it has perhaps dug itself into.

Actually I say it’s a blog entry, it’s more like an essay. But maybe you’d like to read it.